


ran until there's nothing left

by HearJessRoar



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Nightmares, julie has been through a lot you guys, mildly introspective, pls let her rest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:20:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28362315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HearJessRoar/pseuds/HearJessRoar
Summary: Julie's a little rattled. Luke tries to help.Because it’s past two in the morning and Julie is standing there. She’s standing there when she should be safe and warm and asleep in her bed, not in the chilly garage wrapped in a fluffy robe. She’s got those ridiculously adorable monster feet slippers on instead of shoes, and she’s looking at him like she’s drowning and he’s the only life preserver on the boat.Her eyes are red and puffy.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Comments: 29
Kudos: 341





	ran until there's nothing left

The soft noise of the studio doors opening barely registers through the haze of lyrics that are scrambling through Luke’s head. He’s trying his hardest to get them down on paper before he loses them, before they float away like dandelion seeds on the wind.

Expecting either Reggie or Alex home from their late night adventure down to the boardwalk or date with Willie respectively, Luke doesn’t bother glancing away from where he’s hunched over his notebook on the couch.

It’s only when he realizes that whoever opened the doors actually _opened the doors_ does he look up.

His heart drops to his stomach.

Because it’s past two in the morning and Julie is standing there. She’s standing there when she should be safe and warm and asleep in her bed, not in the chilly garage wrapped in a fluffy robe. She’s got those ridiculously adorable monster feet slippers on instead of shoes, and she’s looking at him like she’s drowning and he’s the only life preserver on the boat.

Her eyes are red and puffy.

Luke sets the notebook down immediately, sticking his pencil behind his ear for safekeeping. His head is suddenly resoundingly void of any words that aren’t _julie crying help her help her help her-_

“Jules?”

He doesn’t want to get up in case he startles her, and he doesn’t know why he’s treating this situation like she’s a frightened cat, but it seems like the right thing to do. She’s got her arms braced around herself, crossed over her chest, like she’s trying to protect herself from _something._

She sniffles and he decides right then and there that he will personally beat down anything or anyone who makes her cry ever again. He isn’t sure when he went from hiding from her tears to facing them head on and _needing_ to help stop them, but hell, Luke will call that personal growth. He’d be proud of himself if he wasn’t preoccupied with the fact that Julie’s upset.

“Jules, what’s wrong?”

Julie rubs one of her eyes, like she’s trying to erase the evidence of her tears. All it manages to do is concern him further. “Nothing. Bad dream.”

Luke furrows his brows. “Doesn’t look like nothing, Julie.”

Her hair is piled on top of her head, held up with a purple satin scrunchie, and Luke thinks to himself that it’s a little funny that they were dead for so long that scrunchies fell out of style and then came back again. He remembers Alex’s little sister had a collection of them, in all sorts of colors.

Loose strands have worked their way out to curl around her face, a sign of restless sleep, and Luke desperately wants to tuck them back behind her ear.

She bites her lip, looking near tears again.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Julie shakes her head. “I just…” she trails off uncertainly, looking so unsure of herself that Luke’s heart _aches_ behind the cage of his ribs. Julie is many things, but _unsteady_ isn’t one of them, and it kills him all over again to see her looking so small. 

With a personality as big and vivacious and _bright_ as hers, Luke often forgets the reality that she barely reaches his chin.

He cracks a weak little smile, and hopes he’s right about what she needs as he says, “Not to be all _Alex_ about this, but you want a hug, Jules?” He opens his arms in invitation, and prays he’s not wrong, because if he is...well.

That’d be really embarrassing, honestly.

But Julie nods shyly, and pads over to the couch on her silly monster feet, her arms still tucked around herself in her massive robe, hands buried somewhere in the fleece and fluff. Luke changes his mind at the last second, and doesn’t get up from his criss-crossed seat on the couch. Instead, he reaches up with a soft “C’mere-” and tugs her down.

She’s tiny, and he shifts her easily so she’s sitting in his lap, her legs thrown over his thigh on one side and his opposite arm around her back, supporting her even as she protests weakly about him being ridiculous.

He knows his face is red, but he doesn’t care because right now all he cares about is Julie and her feeling _safe_ again. 

He wonders what exactly has her scared so badly, because she settles into him like he’s a security blanket, one hand reaching up to hook her fingers into the collar of his shirt. Just resting there, like a reassurance and reminder to herself that he’s got her.

And he does, he’s here and he won’t let go because she needs him to be here, and _don’t worry jules i’ve got you i do i promise-_

If she doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. Luke won’t pressure her, and it seems like all she wants is to sit with her head resting on his shoulder. So he leans forward and snags his notebook back off the table, tugging the pencil from behind his ear. It’s a little hard to write properly with his one arm supporting her back, and eventually he gives up on scribbling out real words.

They sit in the golden silence for a while, Luke doodling in his notebook and Julie cuddled up to him like the world's drowsiest, heaviest teddy bear. It’s late, and they always keep the string lights on in the studio at night so they can see without raising Ray’s suspicions. The studio feels exactly like she’d described it to his parents once; a magical, happy place, lit with the soft, warm glow from the rafters.

It’s different than when it’d been their studio, so many years ago. They’d never thought to add things like rugs or plants or a coffee table. The couch was a necessity, required for runaway teenage boys to crash on when they left home in pursuit of music. But the garage had never had this touch to it, like love was woven into the very walls. Luke likes to think privately that it’s like being surrounded by all the affection that Julie’s mom left in the world.

He’s too embarrassed to say that to Julie though, worried about overstepping.

It’s quiet, broken only by the scratch of his pencil and her steady breathing.

“...is that the song from Charlotte’s Web?” she asks at some point, her amused voice cracked with exhaustion.

Luke startles, his pencil scraping a jagged line through his tiny drawing of a multiple little hearts. He’d been mostly unaware that he was singing anything, but he hums the tune again under his breath.

_sleep my love, sleep my only, deep in the dark-_

Well. Crap.

He can feel the blush spread across his nose, but he doesn’t lie to her. Trying to save face with Julie is a pointless effort; she’s already seen him at his dorkiest. “Yeah. My mom used to sing it to me as a lullaby. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. ‘S nice,” she says, sleep making her words soft around the edges. Julie sighs, and he can feel it against his throat. Something in her countenance changes, and Luke holds his breath for a moment, waiting. “I dreamed...I dreamed you guys left me.”

She suddenly sounds far too awake.

Luke closes his notebook, tilts his head to the side and presses his cheek to her hairline. “We wouldn’t.”

“You might not have a choice, Luke.” she says, and he knows she’s right. Julie is always right, especially about things like this. It hurts him that she’s had to learn to expect life’s disappointments before the age of sixteen. It isn’t fair.

It isn’t fair that she lost her mom. And it isn’t fair that three dumb ghosts got dumped into her life without her permission. And it isn’t fair that she’s grown to care so much for them when they’ve discovered that the afterlife has no guarantee of forever after all.

It isn’t fair that life keeps punishing her for her bleeding heart.

What kind of world would look at such an amazing girl, and proceed to try to break her at every chance it got? A cruel and unmerciful one, in Luke’s opinion. 

The same kind of world that would poison three seventeen year old boys for daring to have dreams bigger than themselves.

Julie huffs again, closing her eyes. “You didn’t just leave me, it was like...like you died all over again. There was blood.”

Luke shudders, feeling his face twist up at the very thought. "We spared you the gory details on purpose, Julie. Why’s your mind puttin’ em back in?”

Her hand tightens on his collar and she hiccups. 

His heart would stop if it hadn’t already.

“ _Please,_ ” is all she says, her voice small and broken, and Luke isn’t sure what she means by it, _please don’t joke about that,_ or maybe _please don’t leave me._

_Please stay._

Luke swallows against the lump that's formed in his throat.

He can’t promise her forever. 

Their second chance comes with terms and conditions they never agreed to, and someone has lost the instruction manual for it without ever bothering to let them read it first.

But he can promise her tonight.

And he can promise her _for as long as we can._

He says neither out loud, dropping his notebook and pencil to the floor. They land with a quiet clatter as he wraps both his arms around her shoulders, pulling her impossibly closer to him. The angle is awkward and her arms are trapped between them, the fluff of her robe making her seem squishy like a stuffed animal. She tucks up under his chin, her piled up hair pressing into his jaw.

Luke hums the song again, a half forgotten melody that he only remembers some of the words to. 

_sometimes when somebody loves you, miracles somehow appear…_

It seems like the important part to him, and he can almost hear his mother’s low voice singing it in his ear, the way she did when he’d have nightmares as a child, or when he was laid up in bed sick with fever dreams, a cranky adolescent who claimed to have been too old for lullabies.

He’d give anything to hear her sing it to him one more time, her fingers carding fondly through his hair the way he’d pretended that he hated.

Luke can only hope that it’s half as comforting to Julie as it always had been for him. His repertoire has a rather short supply of lullabies, and he doesn’t even know all the words to this one anymore, the least of which was because he’d always fallen asleep before his mother finished the song.

He just keeps humming the same part over and over, but Julie doesn’t seem to notice. Her head droops on his shoulder, and she jerks with a little snort before she dozes off, forcing herself back to wakefulness. He tamps down on a laugh.

“Go to sleep, Jules. I’ve got you,” he says.

And before Luke can second guess himself, he presses a soft kiss to the crown of her curls. Any other circumstance, that bold of a move would have his face on fire, and Julie’s too, probably. But it’s late, and she’s tired, and it just feels like the right kind of protective thing for him to do for her.

Julie listens to him without argument, and that in itself speaks volumes as to how bone-deep exhausted she is. The tension in her shoulders finally dissipates as she nods off, her fingers still hooked into the collar of his shirt.

And Luke has been dead for twenty five years, he’s a ghost, and ghosts don’t need to sleep. He tells himself this even as his own eyelids grow heavy and he thinks about what Alex and Reggie are gonna say when they come home and inevitably find their bandmates this way, all snuggled up on the couch with Julie’s puffy, red-rimmed eyes in plain view.

But he doesn’t really care.

He doesn’t care that his back is gonna be killing him from holding her this way, he doesn’t care that his best friends are gonna tease him til the end of the afterlife when they see this, he doesn’t care that it doesn’t make sense that he’s getting sleepy and he doesn’t care that it doesn’t make sense that Julie can touch him at all without falling right through him anymore.

All he cares about is that Julie is here and safe and protected, in her cozy robe and her jammies and her big goofy monster feet slippers that she’d been wearing the first time they met, when she’d waved a cross in his face and told him in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of her studio.

He thinks he might have started falling for her the second she nearly shoved that cross up his nose.

The thought should scare him, but it doesn’t. Luke’s chest feels warm at the realization, and he smiles to himself, sure that he looks like a complete dope.

And Luke knows it's selfish, but he's glad that Reggie and Alex weren't here when she wanted comfort. He likes being the one Julie goes to when she's upset, and he'd like to think she was seeking him out specifically, regardless of who was home at the time. It's a high honor, one usually reserved for Flynn, and Luke takes that duty very seriously.

His bleary, foggy brain has the passing thought of, _i'd move mountains for this girl,_ and his heart aches at the thought that he'll never get to introduce her to his mother himself, the way she deserves.

But there's nothing he can do about that, especially not right now at three in the morning on a dawning Saturday, with Julie sleeping deeply against his shoulder. The creases of his tee shirt are going to be tattooed into her cheek, the way she's pressed so close to him. 

So he shifts slightly, careful not to jostle her awake, and rests the flat of his cheek against her head again, one hand sitting lightly at the junction of her waist so she doesn't fall off the couch, and the other on her shoulder to keep her near.

No, there isn't a whole lot he can do right now, and he accepts that. He accepts that he can't really fix this, he accepts that he's going to be feeling the pain in his spine for _days_ and he accepts that his eyes are drifting shut whether he wants them to or not.

And for the first time in twenty five years, Luke Patterson falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote most of this last night and then proceeded to sleep like absolute shit myself so i will be going back to bed now
> 
> juke is still new territory for me but i love them so pls comment if you liked it and then go read my other jatp fics, ive got something for almost everybody by now i think!


End file.
